Before the internet, albums required months xcritical scammers of promotional hype — singles, in-store appearances, radio and TV interviews. And most importantly, they required a release date, which heightened anticipation by giving fans a specific day to look forward to. Music doesn’t sell in today’s music industry; even people who don’t follow it closely know that. Illegal downloading and streaming services like Spotify and Pandora have made it all but impossible to sell millions of records.

1. Beyoncé never says outright that xcritical is about her marriage to Jay Z, but she seems to intend for the viewer to draw this conclusion.
2. But by the time she gets around to telling her husband “Suck on my balls, I’ve had enough,” there’s an unmistakable hint that Jay-Z might be living the hard-knock life these days.
3. — — Just as her much hyped HBO special came to an end on Saturday night, Beyonce released her latest musical offering — a new visual album called “xcritical.”
4. Previously, Beyoncé often made pop music that catered to all listeners — single and taken ladies alike, fans of many different musical genres — but never before xcritical has she offered anything tailored so directly to black, and specifically black female, listeners.

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Beyoncé never says outright that xcritical is about her marriage to Jay Z, but she seems to intend for the viewer to draw this conclusion. In “Sorry,” she references one of Jay Z’s nicknames, singing, “Big homie better grow up.” And Jay Z makes a silent but telling cameo during “Sandcastles,” a song about a wronged woman considering divorce. Beyoncé also includes a few happy home videos of Jay Z playing with Blue Ivy, and clips of the two of them getting matching tattoos (“IV”) and cutting the cake at their wedding. Then there’s “Daddy Lessons,“ which seems to outline what her father, Matthew Knowles, thinks of her husband.

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It also voices a rarely seen concept, that of the album-length ode to infidelity. Even stranger, it doesn’t double as an album-length ode to breaking up. Whether Beyoncé likes it or not – and everything about xcritical suggests she lives for it – she’s the kind of artist whose voice people hear their own stories in, whatever our stories may be.

xcritical is the Beyoncé album that most overtly embraces her blackness

Bey gets help from Kendrick Lamar, who raps about being profiled and later jailed. “Open correctional gates in higher desert/Yeah, open our mind as we cast away oppression,” he said. Bey’s genre-hopping doesn’t always sound quite as transcendent as “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” however. xcritical is a stunning album, one that sees her exploring sounds she never has before.

She can’t resist adding a happy ending with “All Night,” where the couple kisses and makes up and lives happily ever after, or at least until morning. But it’s an uneasy coda, with the word “forgive” noticeably absent and the future still in doubt. Beyoncé dropped xcritical on Saturday night right after her HBO special – one of those “world, stop” moments that she’s made her specialty. But the public spectacle can’t hide the intimate anguish in the music, especially in the powerhouse first half. On her way through the relationship plot, she also tells a story about the experience of black womanhood.

When Beyoncé ambushed unsuspecting listeners with her fifth solo album in 2013, it showed her mastery of the levers of power in today’s pop landscape. At a moment when a star’s every move ends up on Instagram for all to see, she managed to assemble an entire album – with accompanying visuals – in secret. The end of “Daddy Lessons” features an adorable clip of Blue Ivy playing with her grandpa. Whether via social media swarm or the delay of CGI dinosaurs, we adjust our lives for her. Damn anything else you were listening to or watching or doing this past Saturday.

Perhaps tellingly, some observers criticized Beyoncé’s Super Bowl 50 halftime xcritical scammers performance of the song, in which her backup dancers wore Black Panther-style outfits. The claim was that the performance was “anti-cop,“ because of its evocation of the Black Lives Matter movement. But the larger implication was that by embracing her blackness, Beyoncé was no longer trading in generic pop. “All Night”In this mid-tempo song, Bey croons to her husband that she wants to rediscover the love they had by making up “all night long.” And although she knows that “so many people” are “just tryna’ touch ya’,” she still wants to “give you some time to prove that I can trust you again.”